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The Web Revolution That’s Changing How the World Gets High

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By Mike Power

Source: Disinfo.com

It is mainly the young who are suffering the consequences of society’s inability to update our drug laws effectively for the modern age. Almost one third of young people are searching for ways of getting legally high, according to the latest survey commissioned by the Angelus Foundation, a campaign group founded in 2009 by Maryon Stewart, whose twenty-one-year-old daughter Hester, a gifted medical student and keen athlete, died after taking GBL in 2009. (Gamma-butyrolactone, a paint stripper and industrial cleaner, can be used as an intoxicant and is poplar on the club scene. It is active at 1 ml, and causes euphoria and disinhibition, but overdoses, where users fall into a coma-like state, are commonplace since it is so potent. It was legal until late 2009.)

Two-thirds of the 1,011 sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds surveyed by the Angelus Foundation in October 2012 admitted they were not well-informed about the risks associated with the new drugs on the market.

Festivals since Woodstock have been linked with drug use, whatever message their PR machines might seed in the press, so events there can tell us much about current trends of use and the attendant problems. Dip your head under the canvas at a festival medical tent and you arrive at the intersection of the net, new drugs and young people. Monty Flinsch, who runs Shanti Camp, a non-profit aid organization providing drug crisis intervention at American festivals, says that in recent years instead of dealing with the psychological issues caused by LSD, psilocybin and MDMA, they have seen seizures, delirium, violence and deaths. ‘Even discounting the hyperbolic news coverage of face-eating zombies, the real situation is substantially worse with legal research chemicals than it ever was before. It is now easier for an American teenager to obtain a powerful psychedelic than it is to obtain alcohol. Today’s scene is much more complex with the influx of large numbers of research chemicals ranging from the more common bath salts (MDPV, methylone) to much more obscure chemicals such as 25C-NBOMe and methoxetamine,’ he said.

The reasons the drugs are taken are manifold, but he believes their legality is a major draw, along with cultural influences. ‘Kids feel they are exposing themselves to less risk by taking drugs that are not going to get them arrested, and drug use is highly subject to countercultural trends, and whatever the cool kids are taking quickly becomes popular. In many cases the legal consequences of drug use far outweigh the medical risks. Our drug laws in the US are forcing users to experiment with increasingly dangerous compounds in order to avoid having their lives ruined by a criminal conviction.’

Flinsch says he cannot see any likely improvements in the future. ‘New research chemicals are ubiquitous and the problems associated with them are growing. From the frontlines we see the situation getting worse rather than better. The new compounds are poorly understood and have little or no history of human use, and therefore the problems we see are harder to characterize and therefore treat. It is sad that what is currently legal is substantially more dangerous than what is illegal.’

The entire debate around drugs, which was already philosophically and practically complex, has been made yet more intractable by the emergence of these new drugs and distribution systems. Our insistence on overlaying anachronistic models of drug control onto this digital world might, in future years, be seen as a fatal flaw that we did not address when we had the chance.

The popularization of research chemicals presents legislators, policymakers and police with an almost existential dilemma. They are charged with protecting the health of populations and reducing crimes, and these new drugs pose health risks, but are legal. The Chinese factories that produce them operate with none of the quality control typical in most pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, but customer uptake is enthusiastic. Each new ban brings a newer, possibly more dangerous drug to the market, and it is impossible to predict what the next moves might be.

Legal responses seem not only not to work, but to exacerbate the issue. The American Analog Act did nothing to prevent the arrival in 2009–11 of the JWH chemicals, the cathinones found in bath salts, and the other synthetic cannabinoids that had hit the UK and Europe in 2008. And where the early vendors of synthetic cannabis substitutes had sold the drugs online, the US did it bigger and better, and even more publicly and commercially.

In the US, in October 2011 the DEA responded by adding several of the new drugs to the controlled-substances schedule, making them formally and specifically illegal. The Synthetic Drug Control Act of 2011 was finally signed into law in July 2012, banning dozens of research chemicals at a stroke. Soon after the bill was passed, Time magazine quoted a Tennessee medic, Dr Sullivan Smith, who said the state had been engulfed by the new drugs. ‘The problem is these drugs are changing and I’m sure they’re going to find some that are a little bit different chemically so they don’t fall under the law,’ he said. ‘Is it adequate to name five or ten or even twenty? The answer is no, they’re changing too fast.’

Within weeks of these laws being passed, there were dozens more new drugs available in the US. One category, known as the NBOME-series of chemicals, is composed of unscheduled analogues of the banned Shulgin psychedelics 2C-I, 2C-B, 2C-D, and so on. Where Shulgin’s chemicals were generally active between 10 mg and 20 mg, these new compounds, created in legitimate medical settings for experimental purposes, are more potent by a large order of magnitude, active at around 200 µg. Each gram of these new, unresearched drugs contains around 5,000 doses, and they cost fractions of a penny per dose. The compounds existed before the most recent bans, but it was the new laws that inspired their wider use; use that will only grow as talk of their effects is amplified online. They have already claimed victims. At the Voodoo Fest in New Orleans in October 2012, twenty-one-year-old Clayton Otwell died after taking one drop of an NBOME drug. The New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper spoke to festival goers who said many dealers were selling the drug 25I-NBOME as artificial LSD or mescaline at the event. ‘This weekend, it was everywhere,’ festivalgoer Jarod Brignac, who also was with Otwell at the festival, told the paper. ‘People had bottles and bottles of it; they were walking through the crowd, trying to make a dime off people at the festival.’

There have been at least six other fatalities in the US from 25I-NBOME, Erowid reported in late 2012. There are dozens of other NBOME-drugs, and their use is growing. The Bluelight bulletin board has three threads on 25I-NBOME, running to over seventy-five pages with more than 100,000 views. Search Google for it and there are suppliers on the first page. A kilo of it can be bought for a few thousand dollars from China.

We must now allow drug users to make safer choices, and that means a gradual, tested, evaluated but concerted roll-back of all existing drug laws; particularly those concerning MDMA, marijuana, magic mushrooms and mescaline, for these are the drugs that most research chemicals seek to emulate. Only then will dangerous innovation end. Simultaneously, drug awareness classes should be compulsory at all schools with credible, evidenced and honest discussions of each drug’s effects, good and bad, including alcohol and tobacco. This will not end the debate, or addiction, or reduce drug use. But it will mean those who choose to take drugs in the future will be better informed and safer, and the costs to society lower. Governments must now seize control of the market in new and old drugs from amateurs, criminals and gangsters.

Perhaps the web’s final and most dramatic effect will be to strip drug culture of its mystique, its cachet of countercultural cool, to reveal that behind the magic and madness, there lie only molecules. At the end of it all, drugs are just carbon, hydrogen and a few other elements. They have their meaning projected onto them by users and the culture more widely. Remove the thrill of social transgression that acting illegally provides and reframe drug use in a clinical context, as a health issue, and that might change. We know in detail what the route we have taken for the last century results in: greater and more dangerous use. We now need a new approach and new data to analyse. It is not this book’s argument that any drug is entirely safe; they demonstrably are not. But to persist in the digital age with this failed and arbitrary strategy of prohibition in the face of all the evidence that it increases harm is irresponsibly dangerous.

However, although some politicians are able to admit grudgingly to youthful experimentation with drugs, it seems few are willing to experiment even moderately with new approaches in policy now they have the power to effect positive change – even at a time when the people who vote for them are demanding exactly that, and when it is more urgent than ever before.

Mike Power is a freelance investigative journalist living in London. He has worked for The Guardian, the Mail on Sunday, the BBC, and Reuters. In 2014 he received the Best Investigative Journalism Award, awarded by the Association of British Science Writers, for his piece “The drug revolution that no one can stop,” which appeared in the online journal Matter. Drugs Unlimited is his first book.

Columbus Day and the Sanitization of History

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411150By Owen McCormack

Source: Disinfo.com

The strife that has engulfed Christopher Columbus’s legacy in recent years has put the concept of an Indigenous People’s Day at the forefront of discussion.

In theory, as we move forward in our lives, we should make every effort to broaden our perspective and to seek out the truth. As we mature so should our thought process. Such maturation holds true on both an individual and a societal basis. A broad understanding of history enables one to reconcile the past, comprehend the present, and reasonably theorize how future events may unfold. As truths are discovered, norms begin to shift. Such forthright thinking is necessary to fully grasp the complexities of historical events and figures. This is particularly true with respect to the legacy of Christopher Columbus. A polarizing historical figure whose life has been defined, by many, for his astonishing level of courage and intestinal fortitude; nevertheless, such impressive traits should never blur the fact that he oversaw a murderous quest for material riches that resulted in the utter demise of a people. Each year, as October 12th comes and goes, a question is raised – what are we celebrating about his life?

Christopher Columbus was an immensely talented mariner who navigated the Santa Maria and two other smaller ships across the Atlantic Ocean in search of Asia. However, he and his crew inadvertently arrived in the New World on October 12th of 1492. Their long and arduous journey was driven by one clear objective – to find and establish a long-term source of wealth, preferably gold for the King and Queen of Spain. In return Columbus would be allotted 10 percent of the profits, governorship over newfound land, and awarded the prestigious title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Upon arriving in the islands, which we now refer to as the Bahamas, Columbus and his crew first encountered the Arawaks. It was at that fateful juncture in human history that he made two keen observations regarding these indigenous people. Firstly, they were docile and trusting in nature; and, secondly, they wore gold jewelry. Columbus’s own words from his personal journal capture the ominous fate that awaited the Arawaks:

They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

The concept of private property and the pursuit of material riches had reached a frenzied pitch within 15th century Europe. As an independent contractor Christopher Columbus recognized the seemingly limitless economic potential of the land he had “discovered.” It was at this point in time that his bravery had begun to shift to sheer brutality. This transition within his personality was encapsulated in many of the notes that he had sent to the King and Queen of Spain to bolster expectations. In one particular note he promised “as much gold as they need and as many slaves as they ask.” Soon thereafter, he and his men kidnapped a number of the Arawaks and forced them to identify other sources of gold throughout the region. With an extensive arsenal of advanced weaponry / horses, Columbus and his men, arrived on the islands that were later named Cuba and Hispaniola (present day Dominican Republic / Haiti). Upon arrival, the sheer magnitude of gold, which was readily available, set into motion a relentless wave of murder, rape, pillaging, and slavery that would forever alter the course of human history. A young, Catholic priest named Bartolomé de las Casas transcribed Columbus’s journals and later wrote about the violence he had witnessed. The fact that such crimes could potentially go unnoticed by future generations was deeply troubling to him. He expanded upon the extent of Columbus’s reign of terror within his multivolume book entitled the History of the Indies:

There were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over 3,000,000 people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.

Such words offer the reader a firsthand account of the state-sponsored genocide that the Spanish Empire had financed through Columbus. Clearly, the intent of the Spanish Empire was to eradicate the islands of indigenous people through slavery and violence. In doing so they had further established their already dominant political and economic standing within Europe. In a matter of years, Columbus and his men decimated the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands.

The fact that Columbus Day is celebrated each October is a testament to the intellectual dishonesty that has stemmed from the likes of academics, teachers, and politicians. It has become an annual ritual to sanitize history and present half-truths as absolutes. In 1937, Columbus Day was officially established as a federal holiday in the United States; however, to this day it is not observed in Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota. The other 46 states that observe the holiday acknowledge Christopher Columbus as a superior mariner that had unknowingly found himself in the Caribbean Sea after departing from Europe. Incidentally, in conjunction with those facts, it would also be quite fair to label Columbus as one of the “founding fathers” of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Unfortunately such an unpleasant truth has been relegated to the background of history. For decades now we have been hearing self proclaimed “experts” espouse Columbus’s many accomplishments – particularly his “discovery” of the New World, yet, in doing so they have opted to minimize the extent of his violence or have utterly disregarded it. The shame in all of this is that people living in countries throughout the Western Hemisphere, including the United States, have been indoctrinated into believing such fallacies and have been intentionally miseducated.

In sum, history cannot be rewritten. However with information now at our fingertips we can no longer fault our teachers, politicians, etc. for being left in the dark regarding our collective histories. Thoroughly researched academic materials are readily available for those who seek the truth. In fact, it is fair to assume that as people gain a better understanding of Columbus they will begin to support other efforts to acknowledge this particular point in time. Such forthright thinking is certainly evident within the City of Denver, Colorado and within the City of Minneapolis, Minnesota whom have both taken the lead in distancing themselves from Columbus’s crimes and have acknowledged his victims with an “Indigenous People’s Day” on October 12th. Or, perhaps, we should consider an “Italian Heritage Day” – one could certainly make a valid argument for the recognition of Galileo Galilei, Saint Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, or Leonardo Da Vinci’s accomplishments? Be that as it may, most Americans take pride in our collective history and it is incumbent upon us to rectify past errors through education and enlighten our young people to the rich; yet, nuanced nature of American history. By taking a moment to reflect upon the man Columbus truly was is the first step to gaining a better understanding of how far we have come as a model nation.

Owen McCormack is a teacher within the New York City Department of Education. He holds a Master of Arts degree in History from the City College of New York and a Master of Science degree in Special Education from the College of Staten Island. He enjoys analyzing the complexities of today’s social and political issues through a religious / historical prism. His writing has been featured in TRUTH-OUT.org.

Diary of an American Terrorist

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While searching for some light reading a few months ago I was delighted to discover the work of Thomas Ligotti. His unique take on the horror genre in “My Work is Not Yet Done” was so powerful and relevant to our times, it made me wonder why are there not more writers exploring Corporate Horror?

It seems Brian Whitney at Disinfo.com has found another voice that, judging from his description in the following article, may be just as compelling:

The Wall Street bankers and billionaires had better watch out. A new novel, Diary of an American Terrorist, by Chuck Darwin, pictures them mowed down by machine gun fire, dropped from high places, and having their throats slit – in general, being rubbed out in increasingly gruesome and wholesale ways.

“This is a startling document,” says Patrick Quinlan, president of Strawberry Books, the publisher of Diary. “There’s a lot of anger in it, and why not? The bankers have been getting up to all kinds of mayhem for a long time. A lot of jobs have gone overseas. Let’s face it: we’ve all been waiting for a novel where an ordinary working person decides to strike them back.”

In the story, an unnamed middle-aged man has lost everything – his family, his job, his very life. His humiliation becomes anger, which boils over into a murderous rage. He turns it toward the people he blames for his predicament – the very wealthy, who so often profit from the misery of working people.

The man is a military veteran and has wide ranging technology skills. He doesn’t go berserk. Instead, he slowly and methodically begins to choose targets, stalk them, and kill them. Most of the book takes the form of a diary, in which the man – who renames himself Spartacus, after the leader of the Roman slave revolt – records his preparations for each murder, then describes the murder itself in graphic detail. Readers embark on a vicarious kill spree, hunted by both the FBI and an elite secret society.

“People worry about Islamic terrorists from the Middle East,” says author Chuck Darwin. “I think they’re looking in the wrong direction. Who do you think is joining these terrorist organizations in the Middle East, the poor? That’s wrong. Study after study shows that terrorist groups recruit from the same pool as the American military – people from the former middle class who no longer have other options.”

According to Darwin, it’s only a matter of time before well-educated, once middle class people in America begin to turn their daunting skill sets against their oppressors. Who are their oppressors? The ones who sent their jobs to low-paying countries so the company could reap bigger profits.

“My hero is a guy whose life has been ruined. He has no prospects. It’s really the end of the line for him. But he has a lot of skills. He knows how to use weaponry. He knows how to use technology. He knows how to plan and how to cover his tracks. He’s patient. He’s ambitious. He has determination. All those good American things. He starts picking soft targets, wealthy people, ones he has no obvious relationship to.

“How do you stop someone like this, once he gets going? Simple answer: you don’t.”

Diary of an American Terrorist is available for pre-order  at Amazon.

See more at: http://disinfo.com/2014/09/diary-american-terrorist/#sthash.Q36h9Wlw.dpuf

Stressed: What Are They Trying To Tell Us?

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By Danny Schechter

Source: Disinfo.com

Ok, I have to admit it, I feel as my faith in economic justice is being tested with these stress tests. Truth is, I  am becoming more stressed than ever.

The reason: despite all the “regulations” in the Dodd Frank Financial “reform” and the Volcker Rule and The Fed’s “oversight:’ the banks seems to have free reign to do what they will despite the financial crisis, and the pathetic “recovery.”

There have been fines and settlements but nothing is settled. None of them have or will go to jail.

Economic conditions continue to stress out millions even as the Fed announces “stress tests” that appear on the surface to be a way of insuring that big banks won’t need more bailouts.

Sad to say, it’s more of the charade. Partially that’s because the banks dominate the Federal Reserve, a private, not public, institution.

And, partially, because when it comes to economic crises, the stories are buried in the business pages and rarely surface as topics of concern on popular talk shows and media that most folks watch.

Even the financial channels like CNBC prefer superficial soundbite chatter to in-depth-interviews according to “Money Honey” Maria Bartiromo who publicly criticized her old network when she took a better deal at Fox.

Many of us have seen the reports that Citibank, the biggest enchilada of finance, the bank that provided refuge to the likes of Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert “the great deregulator” Rubin and Obama Budget director, whiz kid Peter Orzag, who has been in Court lately hiding how much he made from Citi in a divorce proceeding, is in trouble.

Citi failed the Fed’s latest Stress test designed to see if it had adequate reserves to withstand the widely anticipated next financial jolt to the economy.

Washington’s Blog quotes the business news honchos at Bloomberg and then adds context:

“Citigroup Inc.’s capital plan was among five that failed Federal Reserve stress tests, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. passed only after reducing their requests for buybacks and dividends.

Citigroup, as well as U.S. units of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, HSBC Holdings Plc and Banco Santander SA, failed because of qualitative concerns about their processes, the Fed said today in a statement. Zions Bancorporation was rejected as its capital fell below the minimum required. The central bank approved plans for 25 banks.”

In reality, Citi “flat lined” – went totally bust – in 2008.  It was insolvent.

And former FDIC chief Sheila Bair said that the whole bailout thing was really focused on bringing a very dead Citi back from the grave.

Indeed, “the big banks – including Citi – have repeatedly gone bankrupt.”

Why didn’t I read that in the news? Didn’t Citi “pass” earlier tests?  I thought they were stronger than ever.

Think again, says Washington:

“So why did the U.S. government give Citi a passing grade in previous stress tests?

Because they were rigged to give all of the students an “A”.

Time Magazine called then Secretary Treasury Tim Geithner a “con man” and the stress tests a “confidence game” because those tests were so inaccurate. (DS: Geither was just rewarded by the industry and named president of the private equity firm, Warburg Pincus.)

But the bigger story is that absolutely nothing was done to address the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, or to fix the system.”

That’s one good reason for all of us to be stressed because we can have absolutely no confidence in the stability of our economy, whatever they say about how it’s all getting better.

Here’s James Kwak of BaselineScenario.com, on the stress test story. He sees it as one more financial fraud:

“Despite the much-publicized black eye to Citigroup’s management, the bottom line of the Federal Reserve’s stress tests is that every other large U.S. bank will be allowed to pay out more cash to its shareholders, either as increased dividends or stock buybacks. And pay out more cash they will: at least $22 billion in increased dividends (that includes all the banks subject to stress tests), plus increased buyback plans.

Those cash payouts come straight out of the banks’ capital, since they reduce assets without reducing liabilities. Alternatively, the banks could have chosen to keep the cash and increase their balance sheets—that is, by lending more to companies and households. The fact that they choose to distribute the cash to shareholders indicates that they cannot find additional, profitable lending opportunities.”

Rather than just speculate with my own I believe well grounded if  cynical suspicions, let me quote a few more experts like Mike Harrison, an expert on Credit Write Downs who wrote earlier,

“I would say the stress tests were a mock exercise to instill confidence in the capital markets. This was important first and foremost because it would induce private investors to pay for bank recapitalization instead of taxpayers. But it was also important for the economy as a whole as the sick banking sector was dragging the whole economy down. The key, however, is that the tests were a mock exercise. Despite the additional capital, banks are still hiding hundreds of billions of dollars in losses in level three, hold to maturity, and off balance sheet asset pools. If asset prices fall and/or the economy weakens, all of this subterfuge would be for nought.”

He quotes Mike Konzcal who did his own line-by-line assessment of the actual numbers the banks report on earlier tests. He noted that banks often have to worry about several liens on the properties they have financed and hold mortgages on.

“So the original loss from second-liens, as reported by the stress tests, was $68.4 billion for the four largest banks. If you look at those numbers again, and assume a loss of 40% to 60%, numbers that are not absurd by any means, you suddenly are talking a loss of between $190 billion and $285 billion. Which means if the stress tests were done with terrible 2nd lien performance in mind, there would have been an extra $150 billion dollar hole in the balance sheet of the four largest banks. Major action would have been taken against the four largest banks if this was the case.”

Are you still with me? What comes to mind is the old adage: ‘what a web we weave when first we practice to deceive.’

Why are they doing this?

Here’s Harrison again, from his posts on the authoritative website, Naked Capitalism:

“The real question is: why is the Obama Administration running victory laps, unrolling the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner on the credit crisis, as Mike Konczal describes it? I suspect this is just a political stunt to provide cover in the mid-term elections to somehow demonstrate that the Democrats fixed the problem that the Republicans created.

I think it could backfire if only because the (real) underemployment rate is still 17%. Nobody wants to hear the “I saved the economy routine” when they’re unemployed and losing their home.”

Now, do you see why we should be stressed too?

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and blogs at newsdissector.net. He investigated financial fraud in The Crime of Our Time (Disinformation). His latest book is Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela (Madibabook.com. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

Why Should We Try?

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By Gabriel Roberts

originally posted at Disinfo.com

What follows is a bit of my own internal dialogue that’s been built into why it would even be worth the effort to launch an international tour to speak about how gnosis is a term that we should all have a good grasp of.

In the discussions of what our real ends are, some ideas have come up that have sent me into a back and forth about the actual value of any of it.

Have you ever felt yourself slip into an existential funk in which ask, “Why the fuck should I even care? Why the fuck should I try?” I mean what’s the point? Many of us have been long disenchanted with Religion, Politics, Love and pretty much every other institution of this mad consensus reality that we call life.

Take for instance the viewpoint of Nisargadatta Maharaj, a Spiritual teacher in the Advaita Vedanta tradition in his exchange with an interviewer:

Q: There is suffering and bloodshed in East Pakistan at the present moment. How do you look at it? How does it appear to you, how do you react to it?

M: In pure consciousness nothing ever happens.

Q: Please come down from these metaphysical heights! Of what use is it to a suffering man to be told that nobody is aware of his suffering but himself? To relegate everything to illusion is insult added to injury. The Bengali of East Pakistan is a fact and his suffering is a fact. Please, do not analyse them out of existence! You are reading newspapers, you hear people talking about it. You cannot plead ignorance. Now, what is your attitude to what is happening?

M: No attitude. Nothing is happening.

Q: Any day there may be a riot right in front of you, perhaps people killing each other. Surely you cannot say: nothing is happening and remain aloof.

M: I never talked of remaining aloof. You could as well see me jumping into the fray to save somebody and getting killed. Yet to me nothing happened. Imagine a big building collapsing. Some rooms are in ruins, some are intact. But can you speak of the space as ruined or intact? It is only the structure that suffered and the people who happened to live in it. Nothing happened to space itself. Similarly, nothing happens to life when forms break down and names are wiped out. The goldsmith melts down old ornaments to make new. Sometimes a good piece goes with the bad. He takes it in his stride, for he knows that no gold is lost.

Q: It is not death that I rebel against. It is the manner of dying.

M: Death is natural, the manner of dying is man-made. Separateness causes fear and aggression, which again cause violence. Do away with man-made separations and all this horror of people killing each other will surely end. But in reality there is no killing and no dying. The real does not die, the unreal never lived. Set your mind right and all will be right. When you know that the world is one, that humanity is one, you will act accordingly. But first of all you must attend to the way you feel, think and live. Unless there is order in yourself, there can be no order in the world.

I bring this up because Maharaj is saying there is nothing to be done because there is nothing.  ”Set your mind right and all will be right” he says as the interviewer poses the images of death and catastrophe.

So what are we to make of this idea?  IF this were true, then our daily activities and cares about what present to buy x, or the immediate bill due to y mean absolutely nothing.  We would be better off using our time, ‘setting our mind right’.  Who wants to join a monastery with me?

Let’s switch gears to Christian theologian, William Stringfellow who has this to say about our institutions, both great and small:

According to the Bible, the principalities are legion in species, number, variety and name. They are designated by such multifarious titles as powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirits…

Terms that characterize are frequently used biblically in naming the principalities: “tempter,” “mocker,” “foul spirit,” “destroyer,” “adversary,” “the enemy.” And the privity of the principalities to the power of death incarnate is shown in mention of their agency to Beelzebub or Satan or the Devil or the Antichrist…

And if some of these seem quaint, transposed into contemporary language they lose quaintness and the principalities become recognizable and all too familiar: they include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Hudson Institute or Consolidated Edison or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more—sports, sex, any profession or discipline, technology, money, the family—beyond any prospect of full enumeration. The principalities and powers are legion.

Stringfellow continues on to death:

Death, after all, is no abstract idea, nor merely a destination in time, nor just an occasional happening, nor only a reality for human beings, but, both biblically and empirically, death names a moral power claiming sovereignty over all people and all things in history. Apart from God, death is a living power greater–because death survives them all–than any other moral power in this world of whatever sort: human beings, nations, corporations, cultures, wealth, knowledge, fame or memory, language, the arts, race, religion.

To me, Stringfellow is indeed a fellow with strings that tug on our existential feelings of futility.  His observations have merit when we see that we do create a monster of sorts when we create the Ford Motor Company, or any of the other things in the laundry list.  We can see the monsters all around and in our efforts to make something of ourselves just make more demons.

So to one learned man, Jesus is the answer and to the other a change of the perception of reality and our place within it is the answer.  But both seem to show a very strong dislocation from the world in which we live and its edifices.  So if by one hand we are exercising futility and by another creating new demons, why might we even make another effort toward anything?  What’s it really worth?  We’re just shitting ourselves right?

The chaos magician might say that life is our plaything and therefore we should ascribe meaning where we see fit and leave the rest to chaos, not necessarily without care, but understanding we can’t do everything and the sardonic smile of knowing we will all end up as worm food anyway.

But if one moves past the fear of death to where it no longer hold sway over us, then what?  How does our fear of death control us and furthermore how do those most brooding about life as we speak of it head plunge headlong into it through the barrel of a gun, the top of a bridge, or the slice of the razor?

G. I. Gurdjieff has his own thoughts on the matter.

“There do exist enquiring minds, which long for the truth of the heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to penetrate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into themselves. If a man reasons and thinks soundly, no matter which path he follows in solving these problems, he must inevitably arrive back at himself, and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is himself and what his place is in the world around him.”

So for the sake of argument, we’ve purified ourselves and set our minds right, understood both the illusory and or demonic nature of our constructs and chosen a life of what?  Asceticism?  Quiet contemplation?  The hero of the grimoir, The Black Pullet ends his story of achieving all power and wisdom with this statement:

My days passed between work, study, meditation, and walking exercise. I received a few visitors in my home, but nobody had an inkling of that which passed in my private life. To live happily, live concealed, as a Sage said. 

After much dancing around with these ideas, I’ve come to respect each perspective and identify with a number of aspects of each, regardless of wisdom tradition which each is affiliated with, but it hasn’t made me feel any better or brought us any closer to what we should do with our lives in order to get the most out of it, so here’s my personal approach:

1. In relationships to all other humans and other living beings as well: Increasingly improve your output of love and compassion.  Make generosity the benchmark of your life in whatever way you can possibly think.

2. In relationship to work: Find something that you love to do and commit to it and lay out everything else around it.  You can’t have a body without a frame.

3. In relationship to whether or not to participate:  I believe it is each individual’s choice how they choose to do this, but for me I choose to pick up the paintbrush and paint and make the canvass of my life its own work of art.  After all, art is not often seen as a necessity, but it can take you to new places and show you things you’ve never seen before. Whether real or illusory, the world is a better place with a couple ‘paintings’ on the walls.

Perhaps there is no world to be saved, no actual causes to fight for and no actual tragedies.  Perhaps our mind is the only thing and our internal work is the prime thing for us to work on.   If so,I choose for my actions to reflect my internal process coming to life and translate that to an experience of creation, evolution and art.

I choose to participate in this walking meditation of sorts because I have decided I wish to keep growing, learning, struggling and increasing in love and compassion.  I can’t think of many better ways to do so than by getting into a vehicle and operating in exchange with all of you out there; people I will soon be unable to imagine myself without.

Yes, it is permissible to NOT go, to NOT participate, but I choose to and perhaps in my own way I can make the perfect demon of sorts.

 

The Wisdom in the Dark Emotions

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I recently rediscovered the following article (through Disinfo.com) which seems more applicable to the world today than when it was originally written more than ten years ago. It may help explain certain questions about our culture such as:

  • Why so many are obsessed with youth while topics of aging and death are often avoided.
  • Why the most popular narratives in mass media always have a happy resolution.
  • Why children are regularly taught to suppress dark emotions and are shielded from them in stories and in life.
  • Why some choose to ignore or deny current events.
  • Why more people impulsively need to keep themselves distracted at every waking moment.
  • Why approximately 1 in 10 Americans are now on antidepressant drugs.

These may all be symptoms of a multitude of complex problems, but they’re also examples of the unhealthy ways we cope with them. In my view, being open to and understanding dark emotions are necessary to attain true emotional resiliency to endure life’s challenges. It’s important not just for survival, but to enable us to more effectively act to rectify socio-economic problems which are connected to personal and global problems.

The Wisdom in the Dark Emotions

By Miriam Greenspan

Originally posted at Shambhala Sun

Grief, fear and despair are part of the human condition. Each of these emotions is useful, says psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan, if we know how to listen to them.

I was brought to the practice of mindfulness more than two decades ago by the death of my first child. Aaron died two months after he was born, never having left the hospital. Shortly after that, a friend introduced me to a teacher from whom I learned the basics of Vipassana meditation: how to breathe mindfully and meditate with “choiceless” awareness. I remember attending a dharma talk in a room full of fifty meditators. The teacher spoke about the Four Noble Truths. Life is inherently unsatisfactory, he said. The ego’s restless desires are no sooner fulfilled than they find new objects. Craving and aversion breed suffering. One of his examples was waiting in line for a movie and then not getting in.

I asked: “But what if you’re not suffering because of some trivial attachment? What if it’s about something significant, like death? What if you’re grieving because your baby was born with brain damage and died before he had a chance to live?” I wept openly, expecting that there, of all places, my tears would be accepted.

The teacher asked, “How long has your son been dead?” When I told him it had been two months, his response was swift: “Well then, that’s in the past now, isn’t it? It’s time to let go of the past and live in the present moment.”

I felt reprimanded for feeling sad about my son’s death. The teacher’s response baffled me. Live in the present? My present was suffused with a wrenching sorrow—a hole in my heart that bled daily. But the present moment, as he conceived of it, could be cleanly sliced away from and inured against this messy pain. Divested of grief, an emotionally sanitized “present moment” was served up as an antidote for my tears. However well meaning, the message was clear: Stop grieving. Get over it. Move on.

This is a familiar message. Its unintended emotional intolerance often greets those who grieve, especially if they do so openly. I call this kind of intolerance “emotion-phobia”: a pervasive fear and reflexive avoidance of difficult emotions in oneself and/or others. This is accompanied by a set of unquestioned normative beliefs about the “negativity” of painful feelings.

Emotion-phobia is endemic to our culture and perhaps to patriarchal culture in general. You’ll find it in sub-cultures as different as spiritual retreats, popular self-help books and psychiatric manuals. In fact, my teacher’s supposedly Buddhist response was very much in line with the prevailing psychiatric view of grief. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (the “bible” of psychiatry), the patient who is grieving a death is allotted two months for “symptoms” such as sadness, insomnia and loss of appetite before being diagnosable with a “Major Depressive Disorder.” Grief, perhaps the most inevitable of all human emotions, given the unalterable fact of mortality, is seen as an illness if it goes on too long. But how much is too long? My mother, a Holocaust survivor, grieved actively for the first decade of my life. Was this too long a grief for genocide? Time frames for our emotions are nothing if not arbitrary, but appearing in a diagnostic and statistical manual, they attain the ring of truth. The two month limit is one of many examples of institutional psychiatry’s emotion-phobia.

Emotions like grief, fear and despair are as much a part of the human condition as love, awe and joy. They are our natural and inevitable responses to existence, so long as loss, vulnerability and violence come with the territory of being human. These are the dark emotions, but by dark, I don’t mean that they are bad, unwholesome or pathological. I mean that as a culture we have kept these emotions in the dark—shameful, secret and unseen.

Emotion-phobia dissociates us from the energies of these emotions and tells us they are untrustworthy, dangerous and destructive. Like other traits our culture distrusts and devalues—vulnerability, for instance, and dependence—emotionality is associated with weakness, women and children. We tend to regard these painful emotions as signs of psychological fragility, mental disorder or spiritual defect. We suppress, intellectualize, judge or deny them. We may use our spiritual beliefs or practices to bypass their reality.

Few of us learn how to experience the dark emotions fully—in the body, with awareness—so we end up experiencing their energies in displaced, neurotic or dangerous forms. We act out impulsively. We become addicted to a variety of substances and/or activities. We become depressed, anxious or emotionally numb, and aborted dark emotions are at the root of these characteristic psychological disorders of our time. But it’s not the emotions themselves that are the problem; it’s our inability to bear them mindfully.

Every dark emotion has a value and purpose. There are no negative emotions; there are only negative attitudes towards emotions we don’t like and can’t tolerate, and the negative consequences of denying them. The emotions we call “negative” are energies that get our attention, ask for expression, transmit information and impel action. Grief tells us that we are all interconnected in the web of life, and that what connects us also breaks our hearts. Fear alerts us to protect and sustain life. Despair asks us to grieve our losses, to examine and transform the meaning of our lives, to repair our broken souls. Each of these emotions is purposeful and useful—if we know how to listen to them.

But if grief is barely tolerated in our culture, even less are fear and despair. The fact is we are all afraid and act as if we’re not. We fear the sheer vulnerability of existence; we fear its unpredictability. When we are unable to feel our fear mindfully, we turn it into anger, psychosomatic ailments or a host of “anxiety disorders”—displacements of fears we can’t feel or name.

According to experts, some 50 million people in this country suffer from phobias at some point in their lives, and millions more are diagnosed with other anxiety disorders. One reason is that we’ve lost touch with the actual experience of primal, natural fear. When fear is numbed, we learn little about what it’s for—its inherent usefulness as an alarm system that we ignore at our peril. Benumbed fear is especially dangerous when it becomes an unconscious source of vengeance, violence and other destructive acts. We see this acted out on the world stage as much as in the individual psyche.

As for despair, how many among us have not experienced periods of feeling empty, desolate, hopeless, brooding over the darkness in our world? This is the landscape of despair. Judging from my thirty years of experience as a psychotherapist, I would say that despair is common, yet we don’t speak of despair anymore. We speak of clinical depression, serotonin-deficiency, biochemical disorder and the new selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors. We treat the “illness” with a host of new medications. In my view, “depression” is the word we use in our highly medicalized culture for a condition of chronic despair—despair that is stuck in the body and toxified by our inability to bear it mindfully. When we think of all despair as a mental disorder or a biochemical illness, we miss the spiritual metamorphosis to which it calls us.

In retrospect, a more helpful answer from my meditation teacher (and one more in line with the Buddha’s teachings) might have been, If you are grieving, do so mindfully. Pay attention to your grief. Stop and listen to it. Befriend it and let it be. The dark emotions are profound but challenging spiritual teachers, like the Zen master who whacks you until you develop patience and spiritual discipline. When grief shattered my heart after Aaron’s death, that brought with it an expansion, the beginning of my experience of a Self larger than my broken ego. Grieving mindfully—without recourse to suppression, intellectualization or religious dogmatism—made me a happier person than I’d ever been.

What I learned by listening closely to grief was a transformational process I call “the alchemy of the dark emotions.” Many years after Aaron’s death, after a second radiantly healthy child and a third who was born with a mysterious neuromotor disorder, I began to write about these alchemies—from grief to gratitude, fear to joy, and despair to faith—that I had experienced in my own life and witnessed countless times in my work as a psychotherapist.

The alchemy of the dark emotions is a process that cannot be forced, but it can be encouraged by cultivating certain basic emotional skills. The three basic skills are attending to, befriending and surrendering to emotions that make us uncomfortable. Attending to our dark emotions is not just noticing a feeling and then distancing ourselves from it. It’s about being mindful of emotions as bodily sensations and experiencing them fully. Befriending emotion is how we extend our emotional attention spans. Once again, this is a body-friendly process—getting into the body, not away from it into our thoughts. At the least, it’s a process of becoming aware of how our thoughts both trigger emotions and take us away from them. Similarly, surrender is not about letting go but about letting be. When you are open to your heart’s pain and to your body’s experience of it, emotions flow in the direction of greater healing, balance and harmony.

Attending to, befriending and surrendering to grief, we are surprised to discover a profound gratitude for life. Attending to, befriending and surrendering to fear, we find the courage to open to our vulnerability and we are released into the joy of knowing that we can live with and use our fear wisely. Attending to, befriending and surrendering to despair, we discover that we can look into the heart of darkness in ourselves and our world, and emerge with a more resilient faith in life.

Because we are all pretty much novices at this process, we need to discipline ourselves to be mindful and tolerant of the dark emotions. This is a chaotic, non-linear process, but I have broken it down to seven basic steps: 1) intention, 2) affirmation, 3) sensation, 4) contextualization, 5) the way of non-action, 6) the way of action and 7) the way of surrender.

Intention is the means by which the mind, heart and spirit are engaged and focused. Transforming the dark emotions begins when we set our intention on using our grief, fear and despair for the purpose of healing. It is helpful to ask yourself: What is my best intention with regard to the grief, fear and despair in my life? What would I want to learn or gain from this suffering?

The second step in using the dark emotions for growth is affirming their wisdom. This means changing the way we think about how we feel, and developing and cultivating a positive attitude toward challenging feelings.

Emotional intelligence is a bodily intelligence, so you have to know how to listen to your body. The step I call “sensation” includes knowing how to sense and name emotions as we experience them in the body. We need to become more familiar and friendly with the actual physical sensations of emotional energy. Meditation, T’ai chi, yoga and other physical practices that cultivate mindfulness are particularly useful. How does your body feel when you are sad, fearful or despairing? What kinds of stories does your mind spin about these emotions? What happens when you simply observe these sensations and stories, without trying to understand, analyze or change anything?

In step four, contextualization, you acquaint yourself with the stories you usually tell yourself about your emotional suffering, and then place them in a broader social, cultural, global or cosmic context. In enlarging your personal story, you connect it to a larger story of grief, fear or despair in the world. This gets us out of the isolation and narcissism of our personal history, and opens us to transforming our suffering into compassion.

Step five, the way of non-action, is the skill that psychologists call “affect tolerance.” This step extends our ability to befriend the pain of the dark emotions in the body. When you can tolerate the pain of grief, fear and despair without acting prematurely to escape it, you are practicing the way of non-action. Again, it is helpful to meditate on your emotions with the intention of really listening to them. What does your grief, fear or despair ask of you? In meditation, listen to the answers that come from your heart, rather than from your analytic mind.

The dark emotions ask us to act in some way. While the way of non-action builds our tolerance for dark emotional energy, step six is about finding an action or set of actions that puts this energy to good use. In the way of action, we act not in order to distract ourselves from emotion but in order to use its energy with the intention of transformation. The dark emotions call us to find the right action, to act with awareness and to observe the transformations that ensue, however subtle. Action can be strong medicine in times of trouble. If you are afraid, help someone who lives in fear. For example, volunteer at a battered women’s shelter. If you’re sad and lonely, work for the homeless. If you’re struggling with despair, volunteer at a hospice. Get your hands dirty with the emotion that scares you. This is one of the best ways to find hope in despair, to find connection in a shared grief and to discover the joy of working to create a less broken world. Finally, step seven, the way of surrender, is the art of conscious emotional flow. Emotional flow is something that happens automatically when you know how to attend to and befriend your emotions. When we are in flow with emotion, the energy becomes transformative, opening us to unexpected vistas.

When we look deeply into the dark emotions in our lives, we find both the universality of suffering and how much suffering is unnecessary, the result of social inequities, oppression, large scale violence and trauma. Our awareness both of the universality of suffering and of its socially created manifestations is critical to the healing journey. Knowing how our grief, fear and despair may be connected to larger emotional currents and social conditions de-pathologizes these emotions, allowing us to accept and tolerate them more fruitfully, and with more compassion for ourselves and others. We begin to see the dark emotions as messengers, information-bearers and teachers, rather than “negative” energies we must subdue, tame or deny. We tend to think of our “negative” emotions as signs that there’s something wrong with us. But the deepest significance of the feelings is simply our shared human vulnerability. When we know this deeply, we begin to heal in a way that connects rather than separates us from the world.